Occasional essays about the interstices between science, design, art, communication, and journalism.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

What does twitter mean for breaking news stories? The ISS near-collision case study

On Thursday morning (US Pacific Time), March 12, 2009, a piece of debris came close enough the International Space Station to require the astronauts to take refuge in the Soyez module, just in case there was a collision. In the end, the debris passed by without incident.

I experienced this event almost entirely through twitter. This essay is to share my experience about how this is an example of ways in which somebody can follow news in a format completely different from conventional news reporting. This experience is, obviously, peculiar to me, in that only I follow my set of twitter users, and this is my personal reaction to it. However, I believe that this kind of process is starting to occur for many more people and it changes the way those people will use conventional news reporting.

I first really noticed the issue when a friend and colleague Dave Mosher (@Disco_Dave) retweeted something from Nancy Atkinson (@Nancy_A) about the potential problem. I started to pay a little more attention, started to follow Nancy, who hadn't been in my stream. Why did I first notice it from Dave's tweet? Because I know him, trust him, and find plenty of good information in his tweets, so I tend to pay more attention to them. (The existence of these trust relationships is critical in the use of social media.)

Thanks to Nancy for being the key person reporting the story and contributing so much via twitter.

At this point, I'd suggest you read my twitter stream below. I have just pulled out the tweets relevant to the ISS incident. Read them from bottom to top, just as they would have appeared in twitter. The way I copied and pasted them, they don't have a proper timestamp on each item, but you'll get a sense for the progress of time relative to the time I cut off the stream and copied and pasted it. Re-reading a list of tweets is not really an authentic experience but I include them for reference and to give an example of what I am talking about. I left in some of the meta-narrative about what this all means for news reporting, and it is that set of tweets that gave me the reason for writing this essay.

(Here is where you step out of this discussion and read the twitter stream from bottom to top!)

As you first look at this compilation, you might be inclined to think, "Wow, that's a lot of writing for not a great deal of information." I definitely thought that when I looked back over what had been written. But keep in mind that this came through in real time so it only took a few seconds to glance at each post and I was looking at it in the background while doing other work.

As I read back over the stream, it reminded me of how much I felt a sense of being embedded in the narrative. As I experienced this live, I also felt like I was getting as much information as I wanted/needed to have a good sense of what was occurring.

Alan Boyle made a comment: "Twitter appears to have accelerated news cycle on something that has in the past been not that big of a deal." That really got me thinking about what else there might be to know about this and I wondered how it would be reported once the conventional media (which includes online reporting) got on top of the story. (He is right that this might not have been a big deal. I probably wouldn't have even bothered reading past the headline about this if it were written up as a story.)

When I started seeing some news pieces popping up in the stream after the event was over, I took a look only to find almost no new information beyond what I had seen in the twitter stream. I felt that the news stories had an awful lot of words for not much information.

I mentioned that in a tweet and had varying responses to the proposition. In one case, I was offered an example of a story that was supposed to counter my experience. But when I read the story, the only extra information I obtained was a specific detail about the part that was the debris. Frankly, I didn't care too much about that extra piece unless it had a lot of other context (which wasn't in the story).

I am sure that those news stories were of use to many people but, for me, having followed the stream, there was simply nothing extra added. That is not to say there can't be value added, just that it wasn't yet happening. I'd also suggest it on the spot is too soon for it to happen, as adding that value will take real reporting, reflection, and contextualizing.

My greatest concern about reporting in a case like this is that in the rush to get out news stories online, only the basic facts are included. That is information I could get easily in many different ways—getting collecting facts for a story like this will be an almost automated process in the future, and we are nearly there now as seen by this example in twitter space.

Those stories are often not followed up with the analysis and context that a good human reporter can add. If journalists want to prove their worth in an age when fact collection is easy, they are going to have to show they have more to offer than being stenographers and basic compositors of facts.

"But what about a sense of story?" I hear you ask (and was indeed asked about explicitly on twitter). Reading back over the twitter stream, I realized just how much story actually was included. There was building drama, human elements, tension, and many other aspects of narrative. Indeed, I am sure that it was the presence of those story-telling observations that let me feel I was embedded in the story. I lived the experience through the eyes of others who were paying even closer attention than I was.

So what is missing from the twitter stream? The bigger picture. How much of a risk is space debris really? What does it mean for the future of the ISS and other space travel? How does the recent collision in space affect future space operations?

Even those questions were getting some treatment as tweeters added links to background information that already existed on the Web.

From the scan of news stories posted at this time, I'm not seeing any real value beyond the twitter stream. Whether these are followed up and in what way will say a lot about the state of journalism in a media environment with instant information tools like twitter.

I'm not expecting a lot but will watch people like Alan Boyle closely as there are people out there taking real advantage of the opportunities offered by the highly-connected online world.

6 comments:

You make very good points here; also, the value/problem with a twitter stream is that you're limited to those you already follow and may be missing out on others covering it as well. I always wonder who I'm missing out on...

Nancy's first note on this ISS event was preceded (for me) by a user named Rev. Aaron, who posted a link to a NASA watchdog site; where I found the original warning and then started to write a blog entry about the whole thing, crediting both the watchdog site and Nancy Atkinson.

I ended up posting the blog entry but updating it as new info came in.

My feeling is that news sites should be able to do that -- i.e. update on the fly, even using Twitterfeeds if need be, but interestingly enough, CNN (which I checked regularly) didn't have a thing up about it until just a few minutes before the astronauts climbed into the Soyuz, even though the rest of us had been following the story for more than an hour at that point.

I marvel at how we CAN follow such stories as they break (cf the twittering of the Mumbai attacks), but agree that the time for analysis and post-event commentary that is what a lot of us in the science writing biz bring to the table, may get left in the dust.

Funny how you fear a lack of follow-up and analysis, and yet that's exactly what you've done here! This is a great post, and mirrors a lot of what I experienced while watching this story unfold on Twitter, listening to it on the NASA audio, and filing a story in nearly real-time (once impact had been averted) for National Geographic News. I disagree that value is lost by reporting the facts in an immediate way -- that's one of the pillars of news reporting, to alert the non-media public to breaking news as quickly as possible.But I did have this odd feeling while sending my story that it was already water under the bridge -- half an hour after the event. Twitter did that! I just have to remind myself that despite the fact that much of my little corner of the Twitterverse was already abreast of the situation, that doesn't mean the rest of the world was. Most people don't "follow" NASA and every geeky astronomer they can find.The mainstream papers and Web sites will still provide the world's biggest news to the non-fragmented masses, and it's still our job as reporters to help that happen.

Anne, excellent points. I didn't take it that he feared the lack of followup so much as the lack of more leisurely analysis and deeper stories -- which we all used to be able to do when we were on once-a-day deadlines for newspapers and such.

It may be that we'll see a tribalization of news that my old editors used to worry about... but this time divided by haves and have-nots in terms of the ability to follow in real time some breaking story.

Thanks for your essay. Having been in the middle of this today, it's interesting to read about it afterward. I'd have to say, though, that the journalists who used Twitter to keep abreast of the incident today all probably wrote about it later on their various news sites and blogs, gathering as many facts as possible, after the dust cleared on the event. Twitter was just an "as it happened" venue, and not much analysis. I hadn't been a part of anything like this before, and I admit, writing about the incident later wasn't as exciting as posting on Twitter in real time. But I have to agree with Anne's comments that the majority of the general public who do find out about today's close call will likely do so on a news website, tonight's news, or tomorrow morning's newspaper. Those of us who "live" online may loose sight of how the rest of the world operates yet -- although I have to believe with the failure of several newspapers things seem to be moving towards online, instant news. But from comments left by readers at Universe Today, I also believe there are lots of readers out there who still want analysis and as much info as they can get -- and that means Twitter will never completely satisfy everyone.

Great post/thought-provoking analysis! As a side-effect of having access to information 24/7 (and its questionable relevancy), have we become more and more bulimic in our expectations for fresh/beaking news? Is Twitter, for instance, increasing this strange competition with journalists in trying to be the first to relay information not yet fully digested? Maybe as we are getting used to an acceleration in the way information circulates -thanks to technology- it makes us less patient with in-depth stories that will come hours later if not days later. Perhaps.But then again,we could see this merely as a vast water-cooler conversation and there still may be some value in such an informal way of communication if we keep a critical eye (for the same reason, you would not want to accept everything for granted because you overheard a conversation somewhere - even if the people sharing the news were highly reliable). Twitter or other instant communication could only be seen as teasers and the rest is up to us, as always.

I agree with basically everything posted by others on this. Let me continue a couple of points made by others.

@Anne: Yes, I do fear some follow-up and analysis, and I don't count what I wrote here. It was more analysis of the process than of the ISS event. That is the part I am looking for.

For example, the NY Times posted this piece an hour or so after everything was over: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/science/space/13evacuate.html

Will they follow up and say anything more? I think there are many more interesting things to say about this incident, but it's not clear how they will tackle it. The piece they have so far has no more information than the twitter stream did.

Now, that piece will be of great use to many people, as I stated, but a key part of this is that FOR SOME PEOPLE, the value of that traditional news reporting has disappeared. As more and more people get information in other ways, this will become a bigger issue, I believe.

@Nancy: I am certainly not claiming that twitter provides the whole story. But it has provided as much of a story as exists for some hours after the event. I hope that other outlets will provide deeper analysis. I don't want to get all my information from twitter or other rapid-fire services. I want humans to take the time to reflect, analyze, synthesize.

What I fear is, in fact, that this rapid fire content becomes the whole story. And given that mechanisms like twitter exist, if conventional outlets don't add any more value, then their relevance will decrease over time, at a time when conventional outlets are already having a hard time proving their relevance.

I think this case illustrates the need for good in-depth reporting. We can show that a lot of information can come out very easily, but it's not everything.

I particularly don't want to imply that what you were doing wasn't good reporting. It was the key to all of this information, I would say. But I suspect that even you would agree that what you were able to get out while it happened were just the facts, because you didn't have time to build the incident into a much bigger world. On the spot, it is next to impossible to provide all the context and connections that a human can really provide.

What happens when we have services that automatically track all information on the web to do with the ISS and that feed not only automatically pulls information from many sources including the public audio feeds from the mission (and turns it into searchable text, etc.) but sorts it in useful ways, all done without human interaction. This seems feasible. Wolfram is claiming his upcoming project will start to do some of this kind of work.

When the collection of facts is automatic, where do reporters have a role? I strongly believe there is one and that is in the contextualization and synthesis of ideas.

But will pressures of online news, as it exists now, mean that collecting facts is all online reporting comes? How do we escape that competitive pressure to be first, and replace it with a competitive pressure to be best.

I think this example illustrates that is something that news organizations might want to look toward to prove their value.